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Mar Jennings, the Emmy-nominated authority on style, has published a step-by-step plan to give your house that hard-to-define quality that Jennings calls "casual luxury."

His new book, "Life on Mar's: Creating Casual Luxury" (S&J Multimedia, $19.95), takes the reader through every room in the house, offering instruction on how to make each living space more inviting and easier on the senses. This is more involved than it might seem on first blush. Casual luxury, as Jennings says, embodies six core principles:

1. Representing Mother Nature inside the home.

2. Embracing.

3. Taking inspiration for color from the outdoors.

4. Rethinking, re-purposing and redesigning, from furniture.

5. Creating a cohesive look with repeated patterns and shapes.

6. Selecting the right scale of furniture and decorative object.

"The book really decodes your design dilemmas," Jennings said in an interview in his tidy Westport home, Rosebrook Gardens, which also serves as the visual centerpiece for the book.

Jennings is not one to advise you to "do your own thing." He is quick to point out that, rightly or wrongly, people do, in fact, judge books by their covers. To that end, an entire chapter is devoted to the foyer, which, he says, should include fresh flowers, a place to sit and flooring that's different than what's found in the rest of the house, like a slab of granite or marble.

"Think of it as a mirror image of the welcome mat outside," he writes. And he notes that there are many million-dollar homes that have dreary, uninviting foyers, leaving guests with the impression that maybe they're not wanted.

"It's my responsibility not to gloss over design," he said. "It's more than the pretty pictures -- I want the reader to understand what I did and why I did it. And each chapter has tips built into it.

"There are some items in your home that are non-negotiable," he said. "That window that you can't make larger, the chest that used to belong to your grandmother. So the book offers a work-around for that."

He mentions classic design and decorating mistakes, like festooning the bathroom with family snapshots.

"It may be hard to believe, but I've seen this many times," he writes. "I find it hard to use the facilities when someone I know is watching over me."

As for color, he recommends sticking to the same palette throughout the home, and he also says that it's best to stick to colors that one finds in nature.

"Go outdoors, and you'll see grays and browns and greens -- all soothing colors," he said. "You don't see shocking purple in nature. It's about finding those natural colors that can take your mind to a soothing place."

This volume is a follow-up to his first book, "Life on Mar's: A Four-Seasons Garden," which dealt with the author's outdoor spaces. Jennings plans four more books in the "Life on Mar's" series. The third, he said, will discuss entertaining. The fourth will deal with pets, the fifth will center on cooking, recipes and presentation and the last book will talk about his favorite "sMARt tips."

Be forewarned. If a word has the letters M-A-R, Jennings will take advantage of the situation.

As an aside, it should be noted that Jennings, 42, is a figure skater of some repute. He won gold medals in the U.S. regional and New England sectional championships in both 1992 and 1993.

"I actually landed a jump the other day," he said. "The last time I did one like that was a looong time ago. It wasn't the best one I ever did, but I gotta tell you, it felt pretty good."